DHMS: Black Beyond Data

DHMS: Black Beyond Data. Jessica Johnson and Kim Gallon. October 25, 2021 at 4:00pm. Cosponsored by Africana Studies.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

Black Beyond Data

Jessica Marie Johnson and Kim Gallon

October 25, 2021, 4:00–5:30pm
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Live. Online (with automated captioning). Registration required.

Jessica Marie Johnson and Kim Gallon are co-Principal Investigators of Black Beyond Data, a new project backed by a $300,000 Mellon grant. Connecting the fields of digital humanities, Black studies, and data and computation, the project seeks to create an open resource for scholars to combat racial injustice through digital humanities.

Cosponsored by the Africana Studies Institute.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). She is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mmimo of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She is guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017). Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition,The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections.

Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of History. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. She is the author of many articles and essays as well as the book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Gallon is currently at work on two new book projects—Technologies of Recovery: Black DH, Theory and Praxis (University of Illinois Press), a book about the black digital humanities as a site of resistance and liberation and a book titled, Fiction for the Harassed and Frustrated, which examines the role and significance of popular literary expression in the Black Press in the early twentieth century (Johns Hopkins University Press). She currently serves as the inaugural editor for the Black Press in America book series at Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gallon is also the author of the field defining article “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities” and the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects: The Black Press Research Collective and COVID Black. She also serves on a number of digital advisory boards for digital humanities projects and grants.

DHMS Presents Algorithmic Arts & Humanities at UConn

DHMS: Algorithmic Arts and Humanities at UConn. October 21, 2021, 12:30pm. HBL 4-209

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

Algorithmic Arts and Humanities at UConn

Kyle Booten, Sue Huang, Stefan Kaufmann, and Anna Lindemann

October 21, 2021, 12:30–2:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209
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This event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning. Register to attend virtually.

“Algorithmic Arts & Humanities” will feature presentations by four faculty members from various disciplines at UConn. Their innovative artworks, research, and scholarship draw on computational methods, and range from those incorporating natural language processing and machine learning to generative musical composition.

Kyle Booten is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College. His research on computer-mediated writing has recently appeared in electronic book review, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Creativity, and Proceedings of the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Media Festival. His computer-mediated and -generated poetic work has appeared in venues such as Boston Review, Lana Turner, Taper, and Fence. In Fall 2020, he was poet-in-residence at Nokturno.fi.

Sue Huang is a new media artist whose work addresses collective experience. Her current projects explore ecological intimacies, human/nonhuman relations, and speculative futures. Huang has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati; Philadelphia Contemporary; Rhizome at the New Museum in New York; and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Huang has received grants and commissions from Rhizome, the A.R.T. (the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation), the James Irvine Foundation (MOCA, Los Angeles), Creative Scotland (NEoN), and the SCHARP Development Award (UCHI), among others. She received her MFA in Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and her BS in Science, Technology, and International Affairs from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Huang is currently a second-year member of the Creative Science track at NEW INC, supported by Science Sandbox (Simons Foundation). She is an assistant professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Connecticut.

Stefan Kaufmann is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. His main research interests lie in the area of semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics. For more information visit his website.

Anna Lindemann calls herself an Evo Devo artist. Her work combines animation, music, video, and performance to explore the emerging field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo Devo). Her work seeks to uncover narratives within rigorous scientific research, to visualize biological processes in novel ways, to define new artistic creative processes modeled on biological processes, and to examine the human emotion and subjectivity behind scientific research. Her Evo Devo Art, including the animated short Beetle Bluffs and the art-science performance Theory of Flight, has been featured nationally and internationally at black box theaters, planetariums, galleries, concert halls, biology conferences, film festivals, digital art conferences, and natural history museums. Anna graduated from Yale with a BS in Biology before receiving an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an Assistant Professor in the department of Digital Media & Design at UConn where she has pioneered courses integrating art and science. www.annalindemann.com

Fellow’s Talk: Carol Gray on Law as a Site of Struggle

2021-22 UCHI fellow's Talk. Law as a site of struggle: From Tahrir Square to Egypt's Judiciary. PhD Candidate, Political Science Carol Gray. With a response by Fiona Vernal. October 20, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library 4-209

Law as a Site of Struggle: From Tahrir Square to Egypt’s Judiciary

Carol Gray (Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, UConn)

with a response by Fiona Vernal (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 20, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

To attend virtually, register here

Egypt has weaponized the Rule of Law against civil society, using legal statutes such as the Protest Law, Cyber Law, Terrorist Law, and NGO Registration Law to control and shut down hundreds of human rights organizations and incarcerate many thousands of political prisoners, by latest counts, approximately 60,000 people. Meanwhile, law-based NGOs have brought human rights reform to Egypt’s historically independent judiciary since the late 1990s by litigating human rights violations, often using strategic litigation aimed at striking down repressive unconstitutional laws.

This presentation, divided into three parts, will first offer examples of successful human rights litigation during the first two decades of Egypt’s human rights movement based on interviews conducted in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring. These successes hinged on the existence of an independent judiciary. Part two explores how the advocacy of civil society and judges themselves has strengthened the judiciary while, at the same time, certain actions of Egypt’s Executive Branch have severely undermined, and at times punished, the autonomy of judges. Finally, by examining particular cases decided by Egyptian courts post-Arab Spring, part three analyzes how judicial independence and the rule of law in Egypt are not binary concepts. Despite notable court rulings that violated fundamental human rights, there are still glimmers of courage and independence in the judiciary which remains one of the few avenues of possible reform.

Currently a Dissertation Fellow with the UConn Humanities Institute, Carol Gray is a doctoral student in Political Science and a former public defender. She was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in Egypt from 2010 to February 2011 and a Fulbright Scholar in Montreal from 2013–2014 with Concordia University’s Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability. Attorney Gray holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a JD from Northeastern University School of Law, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a diploma in International Human Rights Law from American University in Cairo. Her dissertation is based on an oral history she conducted in Egypt after Arab Spring of one of Egypt’s leading human rights organizations. Her research is both interdisciplinary—incorporating law, politics, and human rights—and intersectional—using critical theory to examine issues of race, class, ethnicity and gender. Her most recent publication exploring racial binaries and post-colonial national consciousness based on a play written by Frantz Fanon will be published in December in the CLR James Journal, A Review of Caribbean Ideas.

Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. With extensive teaching and research interests in African, Caribbean, and Diaspora history, her interdisciplinary work explores a wide range of themes from slavery, gender, and the law to the history of housing policies. She holds a BA from Princeton and an MA and PhD from Yale University. She consults on and curates a number of public-facing projects, including the production of a series of radio plays exploring the lives of the people and cultures in the Greater Hartford region, in partnership with Hartford Stage and Connecticut Public Broadcasting. In 2019, she curated the panoramic exhibit showcasing how Hartford became an African American and a Caribbean city: “From Civil Rights to Human Rights: African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Housing Struggles in Hartford County, Connecticut, 1940-2019.”

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Political Theory Workshop Presents Ainsley LeSure

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

Thoughts on the World, the Black, and the Political

Ainsley LeSure, Africana Studies,Brown University
with commentary by Gregory Doukas, Political Science, UConn
October 18th from 12:15-1:30p.m. EST, Oak 408

If the political, according to Afro-pessimists and other luminaries in black studies, has been, is currently, and likely will always be militated against black being, what would it take to recoup an account of the political that critically engages this literature’s conceptualization of humanity, blackness, the state, and civil society to recoup an account of the political that is not tethered to the project of antiblackness and white supremacy?

Ainsley LeSure is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Her current book project, tentatively titled, Locating Racism in the World: Toward an Anti-Racist Reality, reconceptualizes racism in the post-Civil Rights era by calling for a shift away from framing post-Civil Rights racism as either unconscious or institutional and toward a worldly account of racism that offers a better conception of the relationship between its individual and collective determinants.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Download the Poster

20 Years of Fellows: V. Penelope Pelizzon

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

V. Penelope Pelizzon headshot2004–2005 faculty fellow V. Penelope Pelizzon’s last poetry collection, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time, was published in 2014 (Waywiser Press). Pelizzon’s awards include a 2020 Quarterly West editor’s choice award for her chapbook Of Vinegar Of Pearl, a 2019 Hawthornden Fellowship, an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and the Center for Book Arts chapbook award for her collection Human Field. New poems from her next book appear or are forthcoming in Tin House online, Ecotone, 32 Poems, The Bennington Review, The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review, The Harvard Review, Plume, and Orion.


What was your fellowship project about?

My fellowship project in 2004–5 was a long poem in segments, “The Monongahela Book of Hours,” which developed into a central section of my third book. I believe that this was the first creative writing project to be supported by the still-young UCHI, so it was exciting to represent the poetry end of the humanities among my scholarly peers.

Would you give us an update on the project?

“The Monongahela Book of Hours” appeared in my book Whose Flesh Is Flame Whose Bone Is Time (Waywiser, 2014), which was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Before appearing in the book, the long poem was published in the American literary journal At Length.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

The time to slow down and feel and think, allowing new poems to evolve, was crucial to the book’s development. The interactive elements of the fellowship year were sustaining, too—it’s always invigorating to feel part of a thinking community! But perhaps most importantly for a poet, the year allowed me the hours of psychic and emotional privacy my real creative work feeds on. It’s unusual to find that sweet spot, that right measure of community with enough productive solitude for new work to emerge in all its tender / brash / ugly / coltish / uncanny ways.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

I remember a lot of snowy mornings and late afternoons with the blue light slanting though my UCHI window on the upper floor of the Austin Building, and the nice smells of coffee being brewed by fellows down in the common area...the perfect sensory image of privacy within community.

What are you working on now (or next)?

This spring Quarterly West published my long poem Of Vinegar Of Pearl as the editor’s choice in their annual chapbook series, and I’ve just finished revising another full-length book of poems, Animals & Instruments. Various poems from that collection have come out in print in journals this year. Meanwhile, I have three new poems just started in July that might be disasters or might be the kernel of the next thing—too early yet to tell.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

I could say poetry’s best knowledge—and that of the humanities at large—is embodied in discomfort. It’s the knowledge that we don’t yet have language for our full reality, and that, as our realities change, we need more expansive and penetrating language. I could say that it’s hard to empathize with what others are experiencing when we don’t even have rich imaginative language for some of our own most trivial experiences. And by “trivial”—well, here I mean experiences that have been overlooked or scorned by the Adults In Charge. So, one exciting thing is that a lot of long-overlooked stories are now being written. But it also feels a bit disingenuous of me, wearing my poet hat, to speak about “knowledge.” When I’m writing well, what I’m trying to shed are assumptions of authority or the idea that I have anything, even my native language, already figured out.

Fellow’s Talk: Erik Freeman on the Mormon International

2021-22 UCHI fellow's talk. “The Mormon International: Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890.” PhD Candidate, History, Erik Freeman, with a response by Micki McElya. October 27, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge 4, 209.

The Mormon International: Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890

Erik Freeman (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Micki McElya (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 27, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.
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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
To attend virtually, register here

“The Mormon International: Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890” examines early Mormon communitarianism within the context and development of transnational socialism by following the journey of four key European communitarian socialist figures who converted to Mormonism during the nineteenth century. Each of these converts’ story highlights a specific type of communitarian socialism from a different geographic region outside of the United States that influenced the growth and development of Mormonism. The experiences of these radical converts to Mormonism portray a political and cultural world that challenges the traditional understanding of Mormonism as a uniquely American religious tradition and international socialism as primarily a secular political ideology.

Erik Freeman is the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and a doctoral candidate in UConn’s Department of History. He earned a B.A. in French at Brigham Young University in 2008 and an M.A. in History at Brandeis University in 2013. Since 2013, he has served as an instructor of history at Choate Rosemary Hall, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he has taught courses on environmental history, environmental policy, American history, European history, and the American West. Erik’s article “‘True Christianity’: The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France,” won the Best Article Award at the Communal Studies Association’s annual conference in 2018, and the Best International Article Award from the Mormon Historical Association in 2019.

Micki McElya received her B.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1994 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2003. Before joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, she was an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama (2003–2008). McElya is currently an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Her recently published book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum. McElya’s first book, Clinging to Mammy, won a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. She was named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network in 2008.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities

2021–2022 Events

UCHI has an exciting roster of events coming up this year, detailed below. In celebration of our 20th anniversary, we’ll be hosting several events around the theme “The Future of Knowledge.” Some events will be virtual, and most in-person events will be livestreamed. Be sure to peruse our offerings and register for the events you’d like to attend virtually. Stay tuned as we announce more upcoming events!

Publishing NOW: How to Start a Series and How to Write for One

September 27, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Publishing NOW: How to Apply for a UConn Internal Grant

October 6, 2021

2:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Drew Johnson

October 13, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Carol Gray

October 20, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

DHMS: Algorithmic Arts and Humanities at UConn

October 21, 2021

12:30pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

DHMS: Jessica Johnson and Kim Gallon on Black Beyond Data

October 25, 2021

4:00pm

Virtual

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Erik Freeman

October 27, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Publishing NOW: Publishing about Politics after (?) Trump

November 1, 2021

4:00pm

Virtual

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Anna Ziering

November 3, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Dissertation Grant Writing Workshop

November 8, 2021

4:00pm

Virtual

REGISTER

DHMS: Daniel Rosenberg on the History of Data and Information

November 10, 2021

11:00am

Virtual

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Sarah Willen

November 10, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

DHMS: Discriminating Data Book Discussion Group

November 15, 2021

3:00pm

HBL, 4-209

DETAILS

DHMS: Wendy Chun on Discriminating Data

November 18, 2021

1:00pm

Virtual

REGISTER

Publishing NOW: How to Publish for the Public

December 1, 2021

1:00pm

Virtual

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Shiloh Whitney

December 8, 2021

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Meina Cai

January 26, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Publishing NOW: How to Write about Race Now

January 31, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Laura Mauldin

February 2, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

DHMS: Anke Finger on The Digital Dissertation

February 3, 2022

12:30pm

HBL, 4-209

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DHMS: Audrey Watters on Teaching Machines

February 17, 2022

4:00pm

Virtual

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Kathryn Moore

February 23, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Prakash Kashwan

March 2, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Micki McElya

March 9, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Publishing NOW: How to Work with an Academic Press

March 21, 2022

1:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Shardé Davis

March 23, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Nikole Hannah-Jones

March 30, 2022

2:00pm

Student Union Theater

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Sherie Randolph

April 20, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Fiona Vernal

April 27, 2022

4:00pm

HBL, 4-209

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Drew Johnson on Moral and Political Judgment

2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talks. Entrenchment and Disagreement in Morality and Politics: Reason, Passion, and the Point of Moral and Political Discourse. Phd Candidate, Philosophy, Drew Johnson. With a response by Prakash Kashwan. October 13, 2021, 4:00pm, Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209

Entrenchment and Disagreement in Morality and Politics: Reason, Passion, and the Point of Moral and Political Discourse

Drew Johnson (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)

with a response by Prakash Kashwan (Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday, October 13, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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The event will also be livestreamed.

To attend virtually, register here

Disagreement in moral and political matters is particularly widespread and often resists easy resolution. Recent work by social epistemologists and psychologists has offered useful tools for analyzing disagreement and polarization both online and in person, by describing how general cognitive biases and heuristics, as well as the affective dimension of normative judgments, make certain moral and political beliefs resistant to rational revision through reasonable discourse. This talk discusses the affective and social aspects of moral and political judgment, how they contribute to explanations of deep disagreement and polarization, and their implications for the possibility of moral and political knowledge.

Drew Johnson is a Philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation project, “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse,” examines the nature and function of ethical thought and discourse. Drew has published on skepticism, deep disagreement and intellectual humility, and on self-knowledge (including co-authored work with Dorit Bar-On). During the Summer of 2019, he was the recipient of the Ruth Millikan Graduate Research Fellowship, awarded by the UConn Philosophy Department. Drew is currently a Dissertation Scholar at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of the widely reviewed and acclaimed book Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a Co-Editor of the journal Environmental Politics. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of Earth Systems Governance, Progress in Development Studies, Sage Open, and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. Dr. Kashwan is a member of the global expert group for Scoping of Transformative Change Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a member of the Academic Working Group (AWG) on International Governance of Climate Engineering (2016–18), a Senior Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project, a member of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) established by Brown University, and an external faculty affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop. Dr. Kashwan is also the vice chair of the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA). In addition to nearly two dozen scholarly publications, his research has been cited in national and international media, including the New York Times, Deutsche Welle, Huffington Post, NPR, Scientific American, and Down to Earth. Dr. Kashwan has written several influential commentaries for popular venues, such as the Conversation, the Guardian, Al-Jazeera, and the Washington Post.

If you require accommodation, including live transcription, to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

Publishing NOW: How to Apply for a UConn Internal Grant

Publishing NOW: How to apply for a UConn Internal Grant, Humanities-Style. with Dr. Matthew Mroz, Internal Funding Coordinator, Office of the Vice President for Research. October 6, 2021, 2:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library 4-209

Publishing NOW

How to Apply for a UConn Internal Grant, Humanities-Style

with Dr. Matthew Mroz (Internal Funding Coordinator, Office of the Vice President for Research)

October 6, 2:00pm, Homer Babbidge Library, 4–209

This event will also be livestreamed. Register to attend virtually.

Dr. Matthew Mroz is the Internal Funding and Limited Submissions Coordinator and a member of the Research Development Services team in UConn’s Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). Dr. Mroz oversees all aspects of the OVPR’s seed grant competitions, manages the internal review and selection process for limited submission opportunities, coordinates OVPR grantwriting training programs, and generally does whatever he can to support faculty members seeking to grow their research.

He has a PhD in English Literature and Rhetoric from UConn, where he studied and taught early modern literature (particularly the work of John Milton). He also has served as Assistant Director of First-Year Writing at UConn and taught extensively in that program.

In this talk, he will give an overview of the seed grant funding available to researchers in the humanities, explore how grant funding, including internal seed grants, can enhance the productivity and impact of humanities scholars, and answer questions about the application and review process.

If you require accommodation, including live transcription, to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

Afghanistan and the Course of US Empire

The UConn Humanities Institute is proud to cosponsor

Afghanistan and the Course of US Empire

featuring Gilbert Achcar, Quan Tran, and Robert Vitalis in conversation with Chris Vials

September 29, 2021, 4:00–5:30pm
Via Zoom

Please join us for a discussion of Afghanistan and the state of US empire featuring Gilbert Achcar (University of London, Department of Development Studies), Quan Tran (Yale University), and Robert Vitalis (University of Pennsylvania, Political Science), moderated by Chris Vials (American Studies, UConn). The event will on zoom (see link below) on Wednesday, September 29 @ 4:00-5:30pm. It has been organized by UConn American Studies and is co-sponsored by Middle East Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Political Science, and the Humanities Institute.

The guests will consider a range of questions. What do recent events in Afghanistan reveal about the course of U.S. empire? What does the rapid seizure of the Afghan state by the Taliban reveal (and not reveal) about the place of the United States in the Middle East and around the world? Do recent events signal an emerging trajectory in the terms of US military, economic, and/or cultural power? What shape might the Taliban government take, and what are some implications for the people of Afghanistan? In terms of representation, what are some implications of the narrative, so widespread in US media, that “we lost” Afghanistan? How do the chaotic scenes of evacuation at the Kabul airport compare to the iconic “fall of Saigon” in 1975, and how does the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan compare to the end of the US war in Vietnam? What is to become of Afghan refugees, in comparison to refugees from earlier US wars, given the current geo-politics of immigration and asylum?

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88001574346?pwd=WGRSN2s5Q0pMVXh2T09DNEtpVHdtZz09

Meeting ID: 880 0157 4346
Passcode: uhgF6iv

Download the flyer.